Charlie's Angels DVD > Reviews > Soft focus, soft core and soft headed

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Hated it
Story	Very weak
Characters / Performances	Weak
Special Effects	Standard
Soundtrack	Unmemorable

Advantages:	Diaz's assets
Disadvantages:	Every goddam thing else

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

The time has come, my friends, to call a halt to the endless retread of Sixties and Seventies pulp TV series, adapting and adopting them for the gratification of a 90’s cinema audience (well, we never did suss out what the 2000’s were, did we? The Noughties, the Zeroes, doesn’t sound quite right does it? Well, I’ll stick to the Nineties and accept the flaw until we come up with the finished article. Now, what exactly was I talking about… Oh yes…)

If we take Charlie’s Angels as a typical example of the genre which includes Mission Impossible, The Avengers and several more, then the source has been milked rather more thoroughly than can possibly be good for it.

Camp, kitsch, play it for laughs, action adventure with a touch of dash may have been quite the done thing way back when, but I struggle to recall any examples of revamped originals which have been a patch on the original, and that’s not just because we were so much more naïve and innocent way back when. The truth is more that we’ve outgrown such blissful ignorance and all the technical cinematic gadgetry, wisecrack bestrewn scripts and so called star names in the book can’t make a sow’s purse out of a silk ear, or whatever the exact phrase is.

Charlie’s Angels features Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz as the easy on the eye lad-ettes of the title, and they’re truly easy on the eye, to the extent that you don’t mind being detracted by their undoubted charms. They’re much more groin grabbingly alluring than the original 30 something ultra serious Yanks, Farrah Fawcett Majors (big hair, big teeth, big lack of talent), Jaclyn Smith (all sub Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman) and Kate Jackson (the extremely serious, even for this bunch, one), and you see plenty of their ample charms and high kicking leather pants, much more than can possibly be good for one when all you actually want to do is watch World Cup footie. However, the truth is that the entire, shallow work is just so much crapola that anyone who participated in this turgid folly has put their careers seriously at risk. Bill Murray and Tim Curry have always been associated with this sort of sub teen nonsense anyway, so their CV’s won’t have been unduly besmirched, especially as they only get relatively low key parts, but les angels are forever tarred with the very unpleasant brush that this film generated upon its release in 2000.

In theory, it should have been a wonderful smash hit, with audiences revelling in the technicolour action scenery and not overly testing script, but it never quite lives up to the hype and pre-release publicity – in fact, Charlie’s Angels is one helluva huge turkey, with the only merit being the association of gobble gobble gobble with Liu, Barrymore and Diaz.

Rest assured, this is really as bad a film as you may have heard it to be and not worth rolling out of bed for. There is some passing interest to be had from the all action fight scenes and over choreographed tussling, but that’s more down to wanting to check down the more than pleasant flesh of the female protagonists than because it’s particularly good or even tolerable.

If you were awarding Charlie’s Angels marks out of ten, then it may struggle up to a two or three on the basis of Diaz’s eyes and other things, but a more honest opinion would cough up maybe a one because they managed to remember to get the asterisk in the right place in the title, or even realised that an asterisk was required. After all, any film which employs Rod Stewart’s Angel and Tavares’ Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel on the soundtrack because their relevance is their title needs all the plus marks it can get and grammar is where it’s at after all.

PS Ultra cool reference point – John Forsyth who was the voice of Charlie in the original series and was Blake Carrington in that other mythical 80’s TV smash, Dynasty, is featured again here.